Rustic waggery is world-famous. The countryman is always ready to jeer at the trifles which we call science; he laughs at whoso stops to examine an insignificant insect; he goes into fits of laughter if he sees us picking up a pebble, looking at it and putting it in our pocket. The Greek peasant excelled in this sort of thing. He told the townsman that the tettigometra was a dish fit for the gods, of an incomparable flavour, suavissima gustu. But, while making his victim’s mouth water with hyperbolical praises, he put it out of his power to satisfy his longings, by laying down the essential condition that he must gather the delicious morsel before the shell had burst.
I should like to see any one try to get together the material for a sufficiently copious dish by gathering a few handfuls of tettigometræ just coming out of the earth, when my squad of five took two hours to find four larvæ on ground rich in Cicadæ. Above all, mind that the skin does not break during your search, which will last for days and days, whereas the bursting takes place in a few minutes. My opinion [[55]]is that Aristotle never tasted a fry of tettigometræ; and my own culinary experience is my witness. He is repeating some rustic jest in all good faith. His heavenly dish is too horrible for words.
Oh, what a fine collection of stories I too could make about the Cicada, if I listened to all that my neighbours the peasants tell me! I will give one particular of his history and one alone, as related in the country.
Have you any renal infirmity? Are you dropsical at all? Do you need a powerful depurative? The village pharmacopœia is unanimous in suggesting the Cicada as a sovran remedy. The insects are collected in summer, in their adult form. They are strung together and dried in the sun and are fondly preserved in a corner of the press. A housewife would think herself lacking in prudence if she allowed July to pass without threading her store of them.
Do you suffer from irritation of the kidneys, or perhaps from stricture? Quick, have some Cicada-tea! Nothing, they tell me, is so efficacious. I am duly grateful to the good soul who once, as I have since heard, made me drink a concoction of the sort, without my knowing it, for some [[56]]trouble or other; but I remain profoundly incredulous. I am struck, however, by the fact that the same specific was recommended long ago by Dioscorides. The old Cilician doctor tells us:
“Cicadæ, quæ inassatæ manduntur, vesicæ doloribus prosunt.”[4]
Ever since the far-off days of this patriarch of materia medica, the Provençal peasant has retained his faith in the remedy revealed to him by the Greeks who brought the olive, the fig-tree and the vine from Phocæa. One thing alone is changed: Dioscorides advises us to eat our Cicadæ roasted; nowadays they are boiled and taken as an infusion.
The explanation given of the insect’s diuretic properties is wonderfully ingenuous. The Cicada, as all of us here know, shoots a sudden spray of urine, as it flies away, in the face of any one who tries to take hold of it. He is therefore bound to hand on his powers of evacuation to us. Thus must Dioscorides and his contemporaries have [[57]]argued; and thus does the peasant of Provence argue to this day.
O my worthy friends, what would you say if you knew the virtues of the tettigometra, which is capable of mixing mortar with its urine to build a meteorological station withal! You would be driven to borrow the hyperbole of Rabelais, who shows us Gargantua seated on the towers of Notre-Dame and drowning with the deluge from his mighty bladder so many thousand Paris loafers, not to mention the women and children! [[58]]